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Jan 18, 2014

Writer Ramblings: Impossible Goals

After a
recent conversation on Facebook with the witty Anne-Mhairi Simpson about
setting goals that can’t be achieved, I am going to jump on that challenge. She
already began her impossible goals, so I am going to do something similar.

My first
impossible goal is to finish the book of notes I’m currently writing. My first
intention was to just gather all my two decades worth of notes into one
location so that I can pick up my old fantasy series project again. I wanted to
write both the Devil Dog series, which is not a fantasy series, alongside an
epic high fantasy series. Since late November, I’ve been compiling notes,
trying to uniform ideas, and basically make some sense of the chaos twenty plus
years of daydreaming has created. I’ve been world building. This task in itself
would normally be what I call my life’s work, but I have a lot of other series,
like Devil Dog, that also needs to be written. So, I’ve decided to create a
“guide” to the fantasy world which describes everything from religions,
cultures, races, magic, creatures, maps, history, etc. I’m currently at 30,000
words, and I’m anticipating it to reach close to 150,000 words (approximately 500
pages). The easy part of this book is it is for my own personal use as a guide
to this huge fantasy world. I won’t have to edit it for grammar or anything
else. It’s just massive and full of pictures. I want to finish the entire thing
by March. That’s my impossible goal. That’s a month and a half away.

500 pages of
notes should be very doable, but here’s the catch. I’ve already written a brand
new first chapter for Devil Dog. I’ve got two more to write from scratch before
I start hitting material from the last rewrite. Starting February, I’m going to
complete two chapters of Devil Dog each week, before jumping back into the
world building. I will also edit each chapter twice that week. Once right after
writing it, and again before I start the next week’s chapters. Once March comes
along, and if I’ve reached my goal of 150,000 words or if I just finished it
before hitting that, I’ll increase the number of chapters to three.

All of this
is still doable, although I will be swamped with all that, I am going to throw
in another task that will make this challenge impossible. I’m going to use my
fantasy world building to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of friends,
which means I’ll be developing adventures and losing a few days a month to set
these up and then play them out. I may even blog those adventures someday. So
I’ll be documenting every adventure. That’s three writing tasks. The good thing
about the D&D is that it will help with detailing out the world building on
a more personal level.

Then I’m
throwing in another task. I’m going to try completing 5 pictures a month for
the Weapons & Warriors posts that have no artwork. Some of the weapons are
fairly easy and I’ve picked up a lot of speed with the art program I’m using.
Designing that “Back to the Future” cover back in November was really
educational, and one day I'll add finishing that Short Story to my goals. One of my first projects is for the Tessen. I originally had a
picture of Kitana from Mortal Kombat there, so I’m attempting a drawing of
Kitana to replace it with. So far I like the progress, but this is the toughest
thing I’ve drawn up yet. She's going to take a little while to finish.

Let’s
summarize this.

Task 1:
Write another 120,000 words in 41 days for world building. That’s an average
2,927 words a day.

Task 2:
Write and Edit two chapters of Devil Dog every week. I estimate it to be around
34 more chapters, so I should be sending it out to editors around June, if I am
able to keep up. Could be much sooner if the world building stays on schedule.

Task 3:
Create, play, and document D&D adventures with friends throughout all tasks.

Once a
month I’ll report my status here on the blog, and adjust the impossible goals
as needed. I truly believe that nothing is impossible; some things just take
longer or require a little more hard work. With that thought, I have every
intention of reaching all of these impossible goals, as wells as spend plenty
of quality time with the wife and kids, work full time, and somehow squeeze in
sleep. Bring it!

See everyone
soon, if nothing grabs me enough to blog it, I’ll see you at the next Weapons
& Warriors post!

Disclaimer

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